Which Celebrity Actually Drinks Their Own Brand?

By Vim, Editor of 12×75. Last reviewed: July 2026. Nobody paid for their place on this list. Some of them would probably pay to be left off it.

A few years ago a writer called Aaron Goldfarb sat down for Esquire and did something nobody had dared: he ranked every celebrity spirit on earth. Not on taste alone. On three axes. Taste out of ten, star power out of ten, and, gloriously, shamelessness out of infinity.

And buried in his scoring was the only question that actually matters when a famous person hands you a bottle with their face on it. He wrote of Peyton Manning’s $200 bourbon: “I kinda suspect QB1 doesn’t really even drink whiskey. Wasn’t he a Bud man?”

That is the whole game. Forget the awards, forget the “exceptionally smooth” on the back label, forget the 14-carat rose-gold crest. The real test is dumber and better: would this person actually drink this if you took the cameras away?

I have sorted the famous into three piles. The ones who genuinely drink the stuff. The ones who own booze and cannot legally, medically, or spiritually touch it. And the enormous, glittering pile of people who were handed a small stake so a press release could call them a “founder”. Pour something. Ideally something you actually like.

These are the ones where the product came out of an actual habit, not a boardroom. You can tell, because the origin stories are all faintly embarrassing in the right way.

George Clooney: the patron saint of drinking your own product

The gold standard, and the reason all the others exist. Clooney and his mate Rande Gerber built houses next to each other in Mexico and, by their own cheerful admission, spent the time drinking as much tequila as they could physically source. They couldn’t find one they loved, so they made their own, sampling 700 recipes until they landed on something Gerber described as one “we could drink all day long and not be hungover in the morning.”

Then they started ordering more than a thousand bottles a year from their producer, purely for personal use, until the producer essentially said: lads, at this volume you legally need a license. That is not a business plan. That is a drinking problem that filed for an LLC. They sold Casamigos to Diageo for up to a billion dollars, and Clooney still tastes the batches. Verdict: he’d drink it if the cameras exploded.

Matthew McConaughey: alright, alright, a-lright on the porch

Wild Turkey offered him a spokesman deal. He asked to be creative director instead, then spent two years helping master distiller Eddie Russell build Longbranch, tuning the blend like a sound engineer. His actual note to a fourth-generation distiller was to “cut 8% of the treble, get more of a bass.” Somehow it worked.

Cranston & Paul: the Breaking Bad boys did the homework

Two actors who played meth cooks launching an artisanal agave spirit is a joke that writes itself, and the mezcal snobs duly eye-rolled at Dos Hombres in 2019. Then something annoying happened: it turned out to be good. They actually went to Oaxaca, actually found a maestro mezcalero, and Aaron Paul reportedly turned a routine shop visit into sending video messages to the staff’s families. Constellation later bought a minority stake, and in 2026 they added tequila made at the same respected distillery as McConaughey’s Pantalones. The chemistry teacher and Jesse Pinkman make a better agave spirit than most people with actual distilleries. Science.

Sammy Hagar: the man who started all of this in 1996

Before Clooney, before the gold rush, the Van Halen frontman named a tequila after his own Cabo San Lucas bar and sold it to a market that had roughly two price tiers. He genuinely loves the stuff, later did a mezcal-tequila hybrid with Guy Fieri that has a cheese factor you could grate over nachos, and clearly does not care what you think. Respect the founding father.

This is the fun one. Because it splits neatly into the honest teetotalers and the one man running the greatest bottle-based magic trick in nightlife history.

Now hold that image next to Lewis Hamilton, who spent his sober years sitting in restaurants nursing an actual ginger ale and hating it, until he went and built a non-alcoholic agave spirit so he’d have something better to hold. Same drink. Same prop. Opposite direction. One man fakes drinking to sell the real thing; the other built a real thing so he could stop faking. There is a PhD thesis in here somewhere.

The honest teetotalers: the whole no-alcohol wave

Then there’s the cleaner version of the paradox. A growing club of sober or sober-curious stars who don’t pretend to drink and instead built things they can. Lewis Hamilton with Almave. Tom Holland with Bero, his non-alcoholic beer, launched after he described feeling “enslaved” to alcohol. Bella Hadid with Kin Euphorics. Danny Trejo, whose Trejo’s Spirits does alcohol-free agave, gin and whiskey alternatives. Katy Perry with De Soi.

This is the rare corner where “the founder doesn’t drink” is the entire selling point rather than the guilty secret. They don’t drink alcohol because they don’t drink alcohol, and the product is honest about it. Refreshingly un-shameless.

And the cautionary tale: Pharrell’s Qream

Pharrell doesn’t drink. “Everybody else can do what they want,” he once said, “but that stuff isn’t for me.” In 2011 he launched Qream, a pink cream liqueur, anyway. It was dead within two years. Turns out a non-drinker’s cream liqueur, aimed at nobody in particular, sells about as well as you’d fear. The paradox works when the product is honest about it. It does not work when it’s a peach-colored bottle you clearly named on the way out the door.

Here is how the sausage is made, straight from a bar owner who watches this stuff for a living: “Most of the brands are more so endorsements, wherein they give celebrities a small stake in the brand so they can be classified as owners.” That’s it. That’s the machine. Give the star a sliver of equity, print the word “founder,” let hype do the rest.

Whether they drink it is almost beside the point, because the drinking was never the product. They are the product.

Special mention to Diddy and Cîroc, the deal everyone thinks was ownership and mostly wasn’t: he was the face of an existing Diageo vodka, the arrangement later ended in a legal scrap, and “the guy in the ads” and “the guy who owns it” turn out to be very different jobs. And a quiet nod to poor Marilyn Manson, whose absinthe was Goldfarb’s number one pick in an earlier ranking, before Manson announced that he actually hates the taste of absinthe and has quit drinking. The tell, once you know to look for it, is everywhere.

Surprisingly, yes, with one asterisk. It’s not that a founder drinking their product magically makes the liquid better. It’s that the founders who drink it tend to be the ones who cared enough to interfere, to taste the batches, to tell a distiller to cut the treble, to sample 700 recipes before signing off. Caring shows up in the glass.

The asterisk is the sober crowd, who flip the whole thing on its head. They don’t drink it and that’s precisely the point, because the product is the not-drinking. So the honest rule is really two rules:

The one to avoid, in both columns, is the bottle where you can’t answer the question at all. Where there’s no drinking story, no distiller anecdote, no porch, no ginger-ale trick, nothing. Just a famous face, a heavy bottle, and the word “smooth” doing an enormous amount of work.

How this was reported

Founder quotes and drinking claims are drawn from published interviews and the celebrities’ own books where possible. Sources: Esquire’s celebrity spirits ranking by Aaron Goldfarb, VinePair on Casamigos, Whisky Advocate on McConaughey, InsideHook, Men’s Journal on Dos Hombres, HotNewHipHop on 50 Cent, The Spirits Business on Sire Spirits, PUNCH on the non-alcoholic wave, Surely on sober celebrities, SOMM TV on the endorsement machine, Brewbound on what makes brands fly or fail, VinePair on 818, The Drinks Business, FoodNavigator (IWSR data).